Knife Ears
by LittleBlondeGoth
Summary: Alternative piece to "Checkmate". Kallian Tabris made a choice at the Landsmeet, and now she has to explain herself. You can justify your actions to others, but inside you'll always know the truth.


_A/N: Companion piece to "Checkmate". In that, Elissa Cousland hands the crown to Alistair. In this, Kallian Tabris lets Anora keep her throne, but her actions are not without repercussions._

_I've always been of the opinion that there's convincing arguments either way as to who you pick at the Landsmeet. And just as convincing reasons against both. Reaching a final decision isn't easy. Ultimately, I don't think there's a right or a wrong choice to be made at the Landsmeet, just a choice. _

oOo

It was a strange thing, fire. Stare at it too long and it consumed your vision, became all you could see. There was probably some kind of metaphor or lesson lurking in that if you cared to look. Unfortunately for those of a philosophical bent, Kallian was not feeling particularly attuned with the mysteries of the universe that evening.

The elven woman was perched on a chair by the hearth, carefully turning one of her daggers over in her delicate hands, polishing it with a cloth as the flickering flames reflected in its surface. She gave over her attention completely to the task in hand, since it meant she didn't have to think about... Well, all the things she didn't want to think about.

Her emotions were in an almost constant state of flux these days, veering wildly between anger, fear and relief, before settling back into a nice, relaxing, seething fury. She considered it a mark of just how far she had come since leaving the Alienage that she hadn't personally stabbed anyone who annoyed her in at least a month. Kallian Tabris of a year ago would never have been able to keep her temper as well as this. The new, improved version took her frustrations out on monsters and inanimate objects instead, which was much more healthy. Her polishing hand became a blur. Why was there never a darkspawn around when you wanted one? Gritting her teeth, she forced herself to calm, bringing to mind some of the mental discipline exercises Alistair had shown her. She had no aptitude for the Templar training itself, but there were benefits to be had from the more meditative side, at least temporarily.

She managed to remain thoroughly engrossed, until a sharp knocking at the door jolted her out of her reverie.

"It's open." She continued her inspection of the dagger, hoping against hope that her visitor was who she _wanted_ it to be, rather than who she knew it _would_ be. She squeezed her eyes shut. As long as she didn't turn round, there was always a chance...

"Warden."

_Damnit._

"I wondered how long it would take before you came to find me." She sighed. "Not long enough, apparently. Looks like I owe Zevran a handful of sovereigns." Not trusting herself to keep hold of it, she placed her weapon down on the floor, and swivelled round in her chair to face the newcomer. She didn't stand in his presence, though she supposed she ought to. This stemmed partly from the man's' rank meaning less than nothing to her, but mostly because she just plain didn't like him. "I don't suppose you'd consider coming back tomorrow morning, would you?" she asked optimistically. "It's just a little wager and I won't tell Zev if you don't."

The Arl of Redcliffe did not look amused, but then, he rarely did. "If you were expecting me, then I assume you already know what we need to discuss" he replied, making no effort to disguise the tension in his voice. Oh yes, she knew alright. She hadn't expected her actions to be entirely without a backlash, but irrationally she'd been hoping to put that off for as long as possible. No such luck. But as her father Cyrion always said, she'd made her bed and now she had to lie in it.

"Oh I can make a wild guess" she said with studied levity. "Unless you're in league with a certain Antivan of course, in which case all bets are null and void." This really wasn't the way to deal with a noble, she knew, but it was a vicious circle. Something about the old Arl drew out her sarcastic streak, which only served to make him more rigid and intractable, which in turn brought forth even more sarcasm... She'd always been one to speak first then think later, a trait which often landed her in hotter water than she would have liked. Such as now.

"Maker's breath, Warden! How can you be so flippant? Do you have _any_ idea of what you did today?"

"Strangely enough, yes I do. I was there, remember?" She leaned back in her chair, swinging one leg over the side in an artful pose of defiant insolence. "My favourite part was when the Landsmeet asked me to decide between the two contenders for the throne. You know, that's getting to be something of a habit now. I named the new King of Orzammar as well, did I ever tell you about that? Bhelen was very grateful." Kallian thoughtfully tapped a finger against her lips. "I wonder if they'll make me a Paragon..."

She hadn't thought it possible, but the Arl's face became even more disapproving, his scowl deepening. "This is not the time for frivolous discussion!" he barked, striding forward to stand next to the chair, forcing her to crane her neck up to look him in the eye. Unlike the estates' more servile elves however, Kallian had no problem at all in matching his stare. "We did not go through all our plans and contingencies just for you to overturn them on a whim. We had an agreement! "

_A whim?_

Her jaw tightened in response. Kallian had been pre-disposed to dislike the Arl of Redcliffe, even before Alistair had opened up to her about what passed for his childhood. After her years in the Alienage, she held humans in very low regard, and as for the noble ones... Well, it had been an extremely long and difficult process for her to realise that she shouldn't tar them all with the same brush. Though she'd been understandably hostile from the outset, neither Duncan nor Alistair had ever treated her as 'an elf' – to them she'd simply been a Grey Warden; a sister, like the other Wardens had been their brothers (though her current relationship with the Bastard Prince was anything other than sisterly). Arl Eamon had been an entirely different kettle of fish.

Oh she couldn't fault him in some respects. It seemed no sooner had his eyes opened from the sickness than he was up and about, demanding answers and formulating strategy for this Landsmeet – helpful, since she herself knew little about human politics. If left to her own devices, she'd have probably gone in head first with her weapons and bludgeoned her way through. But she'd found him extremely set in his ways, and unwilling to try anything beyond his own narrow world view. He'd never been rude to her (which was a good thing, since the last person who'd called her 'knife ears' had to be mopped off the tavern floor), but he'd always given her the impression that he expected her to agree with whatever he'd decided, simply because it was he who decided it, and that stuck in her craw. Consequently, it was all too easy for her to slip back into a game of 'Antagonise The Human'. Not for the first time, she wondered what would have happened if she had gone with her first instincts back at Redcliffe and simply killed his wife. Certainly _this_ conversation would have reached whole new levels of awkward.

"No Eamon. You knew what _you_ wanted to do, certainly, but I do not recall actually promising you one brass bit." In addition to not showing proper respect, Kallian almost never used titles. "Besides, you were so dead set on making Alistair King, would you have even _listened_ to any other option, let alone considered it?"

Eamon opened his hands wide in disbelief. "What other option should there have been?" he answered. "I'd told you Anora wasn't to be considered! She is a noble, yes, but Alistair is Maric's _son_. We fought the Orlesians for eighty years to get his bloodline back where it belongs, and you have removed it again in a single afternoon!"

Elven eyes rolled back into their sockets at the re-emergence of this old chestnut, and her voice started to rise in anger. "Oh yes, that's an _excellent_ plan" she said. "Put Alistair on the throne and then hope his _blood_ tells him what to do, because he sure as hell doesn't have a clue!"

Kallian carefully avoided putting voice to the rest of her thoughts on this particular matter. It was true that Alistair didn't know the first thing about how to run a country; it was something that he'd been forcibly sheltered from, and he'd told her on more than one occasion how even the mere thought of being King made his flesh creep. But Eamon _did_ know the ins and outs of leadership, and the Warden had little doubt who Alistair would have turned to for help had he been placed on the throne. To her, it looked like a very convenient way for the Arl to have a firm grip on power without seeming stepping beyond his station.

"He is a Theirin!"

"He is a _Grey__Warden_, Eamon! And that means more often than not, his precious Theirin blood is being splattered all over the countryside by bandits, abominations and darkspawn!" Her hands thumped down on the chair, hard. The elf was finding it increasingly difficult to maintain a civil tongue. For someone so politically savvy, she thought Eamon could be frustratingly stupid sometimes.

The Arl waved that aside as if it were inconsequential. "This is all very well, but Alistair has a duty..."

Which was possibly the very worst thing he could have said.

"Duty?" she spat, leaping to her feet and stalking over to jab a finger at one of the most powerful men in Ferelden. "The moment he was made a Warden, his first _duty_ became to halt the Blight. All other considerations are... irrelevant. Did you never wonder why Wardens have no other names, no titles? We leave them behind to take up the new. It is simply 'Duncan' or 'Kallian'. Or 'Alistair'." She paused, turning away from him to close her eyes. The ghost of a smile crossed her face as she remembered something once said in the distant past. "That's all he ever wanted to be anyway."

She didn't think Eamon would catch the facets of meaning behind her words, if he even paid attention to them. He would take them at face value, assume she meant his foster son had dreamed of being a Warden, which while wasn't a lie, wasn't the complete truth either. Only she knew that all Alistair really desired was to be liked for who he was, not any of the labels people cared to hang on him. It was one of the things she valued most about the man, and she wasn't about to share this with his foster father. She'd also wisely kept the extent of her involvement with Alistair a secret from the Arl. She was a babe in the world of politics to be sure, but even she knew that should certain salacious details be made public, the waters would become a whole lot muddier.

Eamon ignored her impropriety. It was a knack he had, managing to gloss over things she did because she could not possibly have done them. No commoner physically squared up to an Arl of his standing; therefore Kallian's actions simply hadn't happened.

"And you think that is adequate reason for shirking his responsibility to Ferelden?"

Kallian threw up her hands and began to pace, carefully avoiding the weaponry she'd left on the floor. If she picked _that_ up now, there was no telling how far this meeting would degenerate. "He's spent all his life with you pushing him one way and then another. You wanted him to be a commoner. You wanted him to be a Templar. Then you wanted him to be a King." She folded her arms across her chest. "Well it's too late. He's a Warden, and that's an oath that cannot be forsworn. You are not in possession of all the facts. I am. A Warden isn't something you can just stop being. There are... many things about the Order that _you__don't__know_." A sigh escaped her. "And I can't tell you what they are."

A subtle hint of a sneer pulled at the corner of Eamon's' mouth. "Can't? Or won't?" The Arl stood mimicking her aggressive posture, perhaps without realising it. She couldn't blame him really, not after all the goading she'd been giving him. She sighed again.

"For once, I am not simply being stubborn; they are not my secrets to reveal, they are Orders'. I suppose you could say my oath means I can't tell you, and even though I could break it, I won't. So to answer your question: Both."

Eamon appeared unfazed by this, as if he'd expected such an answer. Maybe he had, he'd been weaned on politics after all. Next to navigating through a Landsmeet, dealing with one young, upstart elf must seem like small potatoes indeed. "And is there anything you _can_ tell me? Or is it your intention to keep me completely in the dark?"

The Warden's brow creased into a frown. How could she explain anything without having to explain everything? Unless another Theirin bastard decided to crawl out of the woodwork, the last surviving descendant of the Calenhad dynasty had the darkspawn taint coursing through his veins, which not only gave him a severely shortened lifespan, but would also turn him into one of the creatures they were battling so hard against at the end of it. She could think of no possible way to sugar coat that.

"There are certain... sacrifices... we make, to become what we are. For the sake of _duty_." Eamon raised an eyebrow at the emphasis, but she pushed on. "None are pleasant, but they mean that even if I had chosen Alistair as King there is no guarantee he'd live long enough to cement his rule, or be sane at the end of it." Kallian gave a short, sharp laugh, completely devoid of humour. "Maker help me, we have an Archdemon out there somewhere. How do you rate our chances of living through _that_? What good is having a King if he's only King for a day?"

"And instead..." The sentence was left hanging in the air.

"Instead, I left a perfectly capable woman on the throne, where she has been for the past five years" she stated flatly. "Most humans think of us elves as being beneath you all, like we're not even there. But we're not blind, and we're not stupid. It's no secret that Cailan was a figurehead while Anora got on with the actual business of ruling."

It was only once the words were past her lips that she realised this was Eamon's nephew she was casting aspersions on, but by this time she was simply past caring any more. For all her bravado and waspish tongue, the Landsmeet that day had been a harrowing experience for the young Warden. More than once during the process, she'd thought her heart would stop dead in her chest – from the initial fluttering panic as they walked in to face Loghain, to the sickening dread that had filled her as she watched Alistair draw his sword and step forward to challenge the regent.

Kallian wasn't naive, and she'd known since she was knee-high how her life was supposed to pan out. Scraping a living in the packed streets of the Alienage, her future husband would be one chosen for her by her father. They would be married, and she would spend the rest of her life with him. That was how she had found herself waking up on the morning of her wedding day, yet to meet the man she would be given to in a scant few hours' time. Soris said he was a good match, better than a lot of others in the Alienage managed and resented her for, but even so…

She would have little to no say in the direction her future took. It wasn't that she despised the idea; she had simply accepted it as how things were and no amount of temper could change it. Eventually, she had hoped that she and her new husband would come to love one another. After all, her own parents had been happy together, at least until Adaia died. And indeed Nelaros had been... Well, she'd never really had the chance to find out what or who he had been, their wedding barely getting underway before Vaughn and his lackeys had come to spoil the party. When her whole life had been violently thrown from one path and onto another.

But what little girl didn't close her eyes to sleep and dream of a handsome prince; a knight in shining armour to sweep her off her feet and ride off into the distance? She'd never in her wildest moments imagined she would become a Warden and travel the breadth of the country, let alone decide who sat on the throne of Ferelden.

Or fall in love with a human.

Even she didn't really know how it happened, except that the man had insinuated himself into her life, slipping through her carefully erected defences with his dancing eyes and winning smile. And just as she had begun to examine the feelings she found herself having for her travelling companion, to have him turn round and awkwardly explain that actually he was the King's illegitimate half brother... Whoever it was up in the sky, be it the Chantry's Maker or the gods of the Dalish, they'd certainly all been in on _that_ particular joke. She'd tried running from him, from _it_, that dangerous yoke that hovered over her neck, but to no avail. She was hooked like a fish, and in spite of his crippling awkwardness and her prickly countenance, they'd ended up in a tangle of limbs and sheets on the floor of his tent.

So his armour wasn't shiny like it is in the stories. And he was far too shy to be the 'sweeping' kind – she was reasonably certain that blushing when she so much as glanced at him wasn't part of the traditional script. But he was hers.

The days leading up to the Landsmeet had been some of the toughest she'd ever known, and this from someone who'd faced demons and darkspawn on a daily basis for almost a year. To be confronted with a mere choice and shrink back in fear... Alistair or Anora? Which would be best, for the Blight and the country? Were they the same thing, or different? She didn't know, hadn't wanted this heavy responsibility to sit on her slender shoulders alone.

It had given her sudden insight into Alistair's state of mind – if he was King, he'd have that crushing weight every day for the rest of his life – no wonder he wanted nothing to do with it. Could she do that to him? And selfishly, could she do that to herself and bear to lose him? A King could never consort with an elf from the slums, no matter how much he loved her.

But it wasn't just their own personal feelings to be taken into account. The darkspawn were spreading a vile stain across Ferelden, and time was running out. Grey Wardens were needed to push that threat back, and there'd been no sign of help coming from Orlais or anywhere else. They were on their own, and when it came to that fateful moment Kallian had been asked to make the decision she'd never wanted to make. The elf had considered Anora, so poised and confident in herself and her right to rule. She'd looked into Alistair's wild eyes and seen the desperate plea in them – 'don't do this to me'. She'd looked and she'd chosen; and Maker help her, she couldn't shake the feeling that whatever decision she made it would be the wrong one.

Her shoulders slumped, some of the fight leaving her voice.

"You want to know what I think?" she asked softly. "I think you're right - Alistair should be King, in spite of the fact you did everything you could to keep him away from it for most of his life." Eamon's face betrayed his surprise at her statement, though his anger was still plain. More so, even, as now she seemed to have changed her mind and was agreeing with him. The Warden saw his expression and shook her head.

"Not for the reasons you've been spouting. Because of the simple things. Alistair is a good man; he's kind and fair, a better person than I could ever be. He couldn't find his arse with an atlas half the time, but his heart's in the right place." She turned away, to stare into the fire burning away in the hearth. "But I need him, Eamon. There are three Wardens left in this whole country, and Riordan is recovering from what Howe did to him in that dungeon. That's two of us, to try and make sure there's a country left to rule! Two! If he's King... I can't do it on my own."

It was as tacit an admission of her own insecurities as she'd ever made, but the words were met with silence. She prayed Eamon would understand what she'd done and accept it. She hadn't spoken one word of a lie – a single Grey Warden could not hope to stand up against the horde, and two wasn't much better – but she knew, deep down, that it wasn't the only reason. _Wynne__was__right_, she thought wryly. _Love__is__ultimately__selfish_.

The deafening calm was finally broken by Eamon's voice, taut with anger but under control. "It is too late to change now" he said gruffly. "The choice has been made and we must deal with it as best we can. I hope you know what you're doing, Warden, for all our sakes." With that parting shot, the Arl of Redcliffe turned on his heel and left the room, closing the sturdy wooden door firmly behind him.

Kallian remained by the fire, transfixed by the leaping flames until she lost track of time, a million different futures playing out in her head.

"…So do I."


End file.
